Since the announcement yesterday, more than 10% of my personal timeline has complained about the impending death of Google Reader. I’m not talking about Silicon Valley pundits here, but French people I know personally: geeks, to be sure, but not professional ones. Actually, just the kind of early adopters, of influencers even, that Google would so desperately like to see using Plus.

And that’s the rub, isn’t it? They’re not shuttering Reader because it can’t be monetized — there are so many ways it could be — or because it’s dying a natural death, but because they’re annoyed that we haven’t obeyed their orders to move over to Plus. So obviously the rational response, the efficient reaction, is to pettily get rid of the social tool we’re actually using, the service they could be monetizing. That’ll teach us.

Here’s a hint, Google: conquering the social space is not about designing a service behind closed doors and telling people to go and use it. It’s about observing what people are doing and what they want to do, and letting them do that. The example to follow here is the way Twitter adopted mentions, and retweets, and so on; not the way Twitter is currently trying to shed its third-party clients now that it has succeeded.

Then I got home and my wife was really upset about it. My wife is a bit of a nerd too but she travels in circles of electronically connected paper-crafters and they are absolutely up in arms about this. To them, Google Reader is RSS. They don’t know of alternative services and as far as they know, new services will never again exist. They think RSS is going to die on July 1 and that’s that. Now some of them will figure out they can go elsewhere but some won’t. Those people will stop reading blogs via RSS and those blogs will lose readers.

That got me thinking. I’ve spent years building up MacSparky.com. There are thousands of RSS subscribers. How many will bother to sort out a new RSS system and subscribe again? The closing of Google Reader is going to result in the great RSS purge of 2013.